francisco. and i first want to also echo what our fire chief just said as far as welcoming all of you who have been serving our country and the world in uniform. i want to thank those of you who helped to run our first responder departments around the bay area. i want to thank those of you who are our volunteers, our note programs here. and of course want to thank and welcome our san francisco secretary of state and the woman who manages and orders around that secretary of state, charles m. charlotte schultz. (applause) >> now, this week as you know, there is a lot going on here. and in addition to welcoming you here at the scenier leader seminar, i want to tell you we were so excited that the sls would be here that we decided this weekend to also require the americas cup to celebrate -- to require the san francisco giants to have a play off game,

the 49ers to play this weekend, the blue grass festival to be here, the parade, as well as the castro sea fair to coincide and welcome you in style. but i wanted to say a few words about the one thing that keeps me up as the head of the legislative body here in san francisco. the reason why i sit with many of our first responders on our city's disaster council, the reason why a few years ago chief white and i led almost a half a billion dollar bond campaign to rebuild the water, fire, and police infrastructure. about every six months i literally wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what would happen if a disaster struck our city. and i think about this and i think i have these nightmares really for three reasons. one, everyone who lives in san francisco knows that in 1906 we were hit not just by an earthquake, but by an earthquake that led to a fire

that burned down literally every single neighborhood in the district that i currently represent in the northeast part of san francisco. another reason why i wake up in the middle of the night, though, has to do with an experience i had 7 years ago in 2005, which i think i might have shared with some of you here on this ship today. in november of 2005 i was asked when i was running a technology company before i joined the board of supervisors to show up at the city of the site of a client. that city was new orleans. this was a few weeks after hurricane katrina, which we all know will be probably the greatest civil engineering set of blunders that our country has made in our country's history. and what we all learn from hurricane katrina is what happens when we don't have a community that is prepared and a set of relationships that is ready to be hit by the big one.

which leads me to the third reason why i wake up at night. the neighborhoods that i represent in the northeast not only represent the oldest neighborhoods in our city, but some of the most vulnerable. we have some of the poorest residents. half of my district are recent immigrants who are mono lingual. i have hundreds of constituents who live in buildings that contain them where they live three, four, five people in a room that might be no larger than 10 by 15 feet, in buildings that are absolutely prone to earthquake, fire, and the next major disaster. and, so, i was asked to just mention if i had three things that i want you to tell us as your civilian leaders. the first has to do with how to deal with community shock. two nights ago as a couple of you commented, you may be wondering why i have a bandage on my hand and i look like i got into a fight at a bar.

i happened to spend a couple hours in one of our city's finest emergency rooms after a minor bike accident. and it is minor, no broken bones, i'm fine. but what is interesting to me in my experience of getting knocked off my bike was that for about an hour or two after the accident, my body was shaking uncontrollably. i was experiencing what i later learned on wikipedia was the phenomenon known as shock. and we know as a community that when the next disaster hits us, not if, but when, our community will go into shock. in fact, we market this in our local efforts as the 72 hours. the 72 hours that hits any community, when we know that disaster responders are still getting together their infrastructure. and what i want all of you to tell us is what are those best practices that you have been studying and you have been talking about that can help us not just in that first hour,

but in that first 72 hours, what is it that i need to be educating our community on during that time period? the second thing i want to ask you is, how our military can better work with our first responders and our civilians. again, not just in that 72 hours, but in the weeks and the months ahead. i participate in many drills with our civilians, with our volunteers and our police and fire departments and our department of emergency management in how to be prepared. but obviously because of the work that the military does every day, saving the rest of the world, we don't work with you quite so regularly. in a conversation that i had with general maya in recent years is how can we best put to use the thousands of returning veterans that we have here in our midst who already have the training and the experience to take care of the world? how did we put our veterans best to use in taking care of us in a future disaster?

the third thing i want to ask of you is to help us think about lessons around recovery. in the wake of new orleans, our city government started looking at how we prepare our self. and one thing we discovered was, as you all know, the relationships that exist on the ground between civilians and between our first responders, really will help to dictate our success in tackling not just our response, but our recovery. and this is why last year in my district, in the heart of north beach which i hope many of you will have a chance to visit, we set up a coordinating council, and this is a council made up of local residents, neighborhood associations, merchant groups, churches, nonprofit organizations, city officials, and first responders. the task of this local coordinating council was to figure out how do we deal with that first 72 hours and how do

we recover? and we've learned an awful lot as we've developed these relationships and how do we avoid the mistakes that were made after hurricane katrina? but what we've also found is that by simply convening these groups, we are preparing ourselves not just for what happens after a disaster, but we are literally building our community today. with this coordinating council, we're figuring out how to fix the potholes, how to deal with the literally million people who are going to descend on our neighborhood this weekend, how to take care of the needs that we have, not just in the future after the big one, but today in 2012. and by bringing us together today, by tackling and talking about the problems we'll deal with tomorrow, we're actually achieving many things here at this moment in october. and, so, i want to ask you to think about how it is that you can help us to build these infrastructures, how you can help us to build community so that we're keeping ourselves

safe today, this month, this year, and for many, many years to come. so, with that, again, i want to thank you for being here. and we as a civilian leadership of the city and county of san francisco look forward to hosting hopefully many seminars like this into the future so we can all work together to keep our city, our state, our country, and our world much safer. thank you for being here. (applause) >> thank you, supervisor chiu. on wednesday we had an lcac or big hover craft land across ocean beach. that would have not been possible without the cooperation of the park service. i would like to introduce frank dean, he's the general superintendent of the golden gate recreational area and these going to talk for a few minutes about these marvelous parks that we have in the area

that much of what is being occupied by fleet week. mr. dean. (applause) >> thank you, appreciate it. well, good morning. i'm so pleased to see fleet week continue to expand and evolve and include leadership seminars such as this and the opportunity to network with our colleagues and each other on search and rescue and public safety. it's just a great addition to the already exciting opportunity to see the navy and our armed forces at work. some of you may be wondering exactly why am i here, what's a ranger doing up here during fleet week. i'll try to explain that a little bit. this is our 40th anniversary of having a national park in san francisco. so, those strikev lands at the golden gate hills right behind that helicopter there are now part of the golden gate

national parks. and that happened 40 years ago when the army decided that those lands were no longer necessary for national defense. so, that strategic entrance to this harbor was the last land that our troops and sailors and marines and soldiers would see if they departed for the pacific theater in world war ii and korea and vietnam, and also the first thing they would see upon returning back to the bay area. so, between the presidio and the head lands, we now have wonderful park lands that have been converted. we call it converting from post to park. repurposing those lands from national defense to environmental defense. and i believe it is probably the most accessful base conversion in the united states. if you haven't been to the presidio, i think you should try and make that. if you're from out of town, it's a spectacular transition

there. so, these golden gate national parks that i happen to be the superintendent of has now become after 40 years the second most visited national park in our country. we get 14 million people a year that come to our parks. it has spectacular coastline, includes muir wood, alcatraz, we get to tell the stories, stories about essentially what you and your predecessors did this this area. our headquarters, fort mason, was the fisherman's wharf area was the port of embarkation for the wars in the pacific. just this week we brought in a world war ii 16-inch bottle ship gun to the marine head lands to put it up at battery townsly which would have been the pinnacle of coastal artillery in world war ii. so, we now have a canon or artillery collection that spans in our park that spans from the civil war to the cold war,

including a preserve 19-missile base. some of you also know that during the 1906 earthquake, the army assisted greatly in the response to the city's needs. and the public flocked to the open lands at golden gate park and at the presidio, the open areas that they had there. the army provided tents and food for them during that transition period. all of our planning indicates that that probably would happen again if we had a big one. they probably would be coming to the lands that we now manage. so, what is the park services' connection to all of this? we have our centennial of our organization coming up in 2016 in four years, and we feel what we believe are america's best ideas. it's grand canyon, yosemite, but also stewarding america's history and that would include independence hall, gettysburg, mount rush more, and most

recently flight 93. my dress uniform and that famous hat is really derived from the world war i uniform from 1916, little changed from that time. the first rangers that patroled our parks before there was a park service were calvary soldiers. the presidio here in san francisco sent buffalo soldiers up to yosemite and sequoia every summer to control the parks, to keep the poachers out and to begin the construction of roads. the first federal superintendent of sequoia national park was colonel charles young. he happened to be the third african-american to graduate from west point. he went on to become the first black colonel in the army. amazing story. i believe he'll be honored sometime later this year by some sort of a national monument at his home in ohio. so, pretty interesting fellow and pretty amazing leadership demonstrated. today our rangers across the country perform modern-day

public services, often away from municipalities. so, we're the only game in town at yosemite. we perform search and rescue police, emergency services, medical, even corner duties. closer to home, we have urban [speaker not understood] here in san francisco and at the national mall. so, we have a sprat strong cadre of rangers that help in incident managements, presidential visits, americas cup here, most recently helping with the city and the coast guard and even katrina and the gulf war spill most recently. closer to home the golden gate bridge connects not only our park lands but our communities. since 9/11 it really has connected our law enforcement public safety officials even more seriously and with greater intent as we protect the bridge from any threat. americas cup, the races here have fostered even greater coordination and partnership with the department of

emergency management in the city, city fire department, city police department and the coast guard. and we look forward to working with san francisco and our local governments and the military to make our emergency planning even more effective. so, thank you again for your time and we'll see you out in the park. (applause) >> thank you. i learned a lot on that talk i didn't know. that was great. it's now my pleasure to introduce our speaker, keynote speaker for this morning. but before i do that, i want to recognize his wife. it is an honor for many women who are married to significant dignitaries in our country where they become the sponsors

for various ships. and it's a very significant ship that mrs. perry is the sponsor for. she's the sponsor for the u.s.s. cole and i want to welcome you, lee perry, here this morning and thank you for all you've done and supporting your husband and his marvelous career. thank you, ms. perry. (applause) >> our speaker this morning, the former secretary of defense william perry, i first met when he was the deputy secretary of defense, and he and mrs. perry came to korea where i was the c5j5 and i was assigned to escort them around. and i had a lot of those kinds of duties while i was assigned to korea. but it was the most pleasant experience i had and i say that honestly, to get to know these two people. and he then became our secretary of defense. and many of us that have served

thought that he was one of the best secretary of defenses we've ever had. he's currently a senior fellow at the hoover institute and a freeman foley institute of international studies. he is the michael and barbara bavarian professor at stanford university and serves as co-director of the nuclear risk reduction initiative and preventive defense project. please help me welcome our speaker this morning, former secretary of defense william perry. (applause)

>> what a pleasure it is to be aboard this symbol of america's millery power, the uss macon island. what a pleasure it is to be among the men and women of our armed forces and the men and women of the first responders of the san francisco bay area. fleet week for many years in san francisco was a somewhat [inaudible] affair and it has been transformed into this great coming together by the military and the first responders, the great coming together of our uniformed personnel and a great [speaker not understood] of san francisco. this amazing transformation in

the last few years was due primarily to the vision and the dedication of three people, george and charlotte schultz and mike myers. i'd like to pause to thank all three of them for this work. (applause) >> and in april of 1996, my last year as secretary of defense, i met one morning intelligence briefing at 7 o'clock along with general charlie. the previous day general hughes had briefed us that the chinese military were to begin extensive military maneuvers in the taiwan strait. this morning we were stunned to learn that they had fired two

missiles that landed just 10 miles off the coast of taiwan. the taiwanese had a presidential election underway, and the chinese were using a not too subtle way of explaining to them what they wanted the outcome of that election to be. thises was an unacceptable form of military coercion and both the general and i agreed that a strong response was needed by the united states, something more than a diplomatic letter of protest. after some discussion we agreed to send two carrier battle groups to taiwan. within an hour the president had approved our recommendation and before the day was over, though carrier battle groups were underway steaming to taiwan. at a press conference the next

day, i was asked would i not fear this would lead to military clash with china. i said, i was not concerned of that. and when asked why, i said, i think, well, because we have the best damn navy in the world. this was not an extravagant or hyper bolic statement t. was simply a statement of fact. it was a fact that not only i knew. it was a fact which other nations understood. even one carrier battle group had more military fire power than any other nation's entire navy, and we had two of them on the way to taiwan. so, i was confident that no one was going to challenge the fleet that we were sending there.

this -- and in fact, they did not challenge it even before our two carrier battle ships arrived in taiwan, the crisis was over and the maneuvers had been subsided. this positive result was possible because of the military capability of our navy and because both carrier battle groups were battle ready and able to steam towards their destination in less than 24 hours. so, why were we able to respond so effectively? certainly one important reason, because the technology in our ships was the best in the world. the results are true, that the training and the spirit of our sailors was superb. and we had absolutely first-class leadership in the navy.

you will hear later today from admiral gary some examples of just how impressive that leadership is. the operational readiness of the fleet was a result, first of all, of having bases all around the world. but secondly because the strong program of exercise we conducted. the exercises were not only conducted on military scenarios, but we had an extensive set of exercises involved in humanitarian response. during the time i was secretary, we had a disaster response very similar to the one they're doing here in san francisco today. we bought naval forces from the united states, from russia and japan all to honolulu where we

had simulated a tsunami disaster. and these three great nations brought their fleets to honolulu exercising how to respond and alleviate that disaster. well, that was then. how about now? last year the united states released a new security strategy. most of you probably have not even heard of that, but i have to tell you this was a big deal. it was one of the fifth american security strategies that we have issued since the civil war. among the highlights of that security strategy was a strong statement that the united states had the highest economic and security interests in the asia pacific region. not in europe as has been for

100 years prior to that, than the asia pacific region. secondly, that we would maintain freedom of access throughout that region. in particular, we would maintain the sea lanes in that area, whatever the challenge might be. even as we reduce our defense budget, therefore we must maintain and would maintain a powerful navy, and that that navy would be charged with maintaining the freedom of those sea lanes. we had, of course, to be concerned as to whether there would be a challenge for that. we observed that the rise and shine has more energy needs for more energy than they can produce themselves, and to maintain the economic growth

which they believe is essential. we observed that the south china sea is a potential source of energy supplies for china and that there is a contention among the nations in that region as to where the ownership and rights of access are to the south china sea. and this is conceivable that china might seek to reestablish its claim there by military coercion and that could lead them into a confrontation with the united states' desire to maintain free access. the best way of avoiding that military conflict is what we should see because the military conflict with china would be catastrophic for both nations, indeed for the whole region. so, we want to avoid that. i believe the best way of avoiding that is by maintaining

a -- continuing to maintain a strong naval presence in the region, and by having an unambiguous commitment to doing that. i believe that our new national security strategy is that unambiguous commitment, and i believe that the u.s. navy is capable of maintaining that unambiguous military strength. as we sit here this morning aboard the uss macon island, in san francisco bay, looking out to the pacific, it is easy to believe that the united states is, in fact, a pacific power and that to keep it that way we will maintain the best damn navy in the world. thank you very much. (applause)speaker ....

>> now i'm going to introduce our next speaker, major general melvin spee splt e i've known melvin for a number of years, obviously we served together in the marine corps. i can tell you he's been with fleet week for 3 years now and the one thing about mel, he's got a lot of ideas and he accepts no as an interim answer because a lot of things that he wanted to do to make fleet week better originally the answer from authorities was no. and he made some amazing things happen just through his will. a commander can will things to happen. and i really want to

thank you, mel, for that whole peer to peer medical exchange was your idea and it was just a huge hit and i thank you so much for that. he's offered to be the pifrplg hitter for admiral roughhead who was captured back in massachusetts and couldn't make it back out here and with his experience, one thing about melvin speese, he is the premiere taipber in the marine corps. please help me welcome major general melvin speese >> well, of course i am not admiral roughhead, mr. secretary, but i did spend the night at marine's memorial club so i think i'm able to fill in